Political frames, semantic spaces and critical junctures: meanings trajectories in Spanish mainstream press during the Catalan secessionist challenge (2012-2019)

Although the relationship between language and political views and action, is often assumed, specially by scholars adopting a constructivist standpoint (e.g., Wendt, 1992; Schmidt, 2010, Hay, 2011), this connection has been difficult to test in a rigorous manner given the difficulties capturing and comparing ideational contexts, and in particular the evolution of meanings and shared understandings of socio-political contexts. Our interdisciplinary research overcomes this problem developing an innovative method to map semantic spaces and trace political frames trajectories, generating quantitative data that can be used to analyze the connections between changes in ideas and socio-political phenomena. We test our approach in Spain where the political/ identarian Catalan conflict has made political frames acquire a particular salience. The fight for political hegemony implies a fight at the ideational level and specially a competition in terms of decontestation of meanings of certain key concepts, such as “the people” and “the nation” (Ranciere 1995; Freeden 1996). Language helps to discursively create internal frontiers and to fix political identities around them (Laclau and Mouffe 2001; Laclau 2005). Media frames activate “frames of thought” and therefore impact the way in which the public processes and reacts to information. (Chong and Duckman 2007). Using an unsupervised machine learning method we track the relative salience, level of semantic fragmentation and fluctuations in meanings of a set of key political terms in the two largest Spanish newspapers, El País and El Mundo throughout, 8 years (2012-2019). We scrape the text of each year of the sequence mentioned (via Python code) and generate semantic spaces from each text via Latent Semantic Analysis (Dumais 2004). Then we align all these spaces for each newspaper (using Gallito Studio) (Jorge-Botana et al 2020) and extract indices (using R code and gallitoAPI service) capturing the fragmentation of the meaning of key frames, as well as their relative salience in each year. Finally, we use new institutional theory (Hall and Taylor 1996) to explain the observed changes in political frames in the context of the Catalan political crisis. We demonstrate that the paths followed by relevant nationalist/identity-related frames fit a punctuated equilibrium model (Baumgartner and Jones, 2010) and that some political events in Catalonia, acted as critical junctures, leaving long-lasting legacies in the meanings reflected in Madrid’s press. The methodology presented in this paper aims to pave the way for a more integrated comparative analysis of policy and social change, by providing a tool to capture numerically and represent visually the ideational context and trace frames in written communication or in transcribed oral ones. Co-authors: Guillermo Jorge-Botana, Department of Psychobiology & Behavioral Sciences Methods, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Madrid, Spain Jose Angel Martinez-Huertas, Department of Social Psychology and Methodology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, UAM Ricardo Olmos Albacete, Department of Social Psychology and Methodology, UAM Alejandro Martínez-Mingo, Department of Cognitive Psychology, UAM